Lima’s Many Faces

LIMA, Peru–With Julianna back from the brink after four days of illness in Trujillo, we enthusiastically packed our gear last Monday morning and hit the road for the 12-hour bus ride down the coast to Lima.

The Pan-American Highway from the rear window of our bus.

The utter bleakness of the terrain along this stretch of the Pan-American Highway is awe-inspiring. Cruising along at a steady 45 mph, with the crashing waves of the Pacific on our right and the sawtooth foothills of the Andes a few miles distant on our left, it often felt as though we were rumbling across the surface of the moon, not a solitary blade of grass or twig of vegetation anywhere in sight.

We arrived in Lima around nine o’clock in the evening and made our way to the hostel I’d called the day before. The place was mentioned in our guidebook, so I assumed it was like any other travelers’ lodging. Upon arrival, however, we discovered we were staying in someone’s home. When the señora answered the door, she offered a warm welcome, and then lead us through the living room where a large group of family and friends were celebrating her grown son’s birthday. Everyone nodded and smiled with mouths full of birthday cake, apparently finding nothing strange about the sight of two road-weary gringos shuffling through the middle of their party with dusty backpacks bumping into tables and chairs. We’ve been here three days now, and, despite the fact that our new family stays up rather late talking and laughing in the living room directly outside our door, we’ve found we quite enjoy the cozy ambiance of a private home.

The traffic in downtown Lima requires full-time traffic cops.

The city of Lima pulses with life and energy. For centuries the unfathomably wealthy seat of the Spanish colonial empire, it’s now a convulsive metropolis of 9 million inhabitants that sprawls across a desert valley, from craggy cliffs overlooking the Pacific to the barren slopes of the Andean foothills. It’s a city of stark contrasts and contradictions. It’s both richer and poorer than anywhere else we’ve been thus far in South America. It’s also more beautiful and uglier, more manicured and squalid, more vulgar and poignant–truly a city of haves and have-nots.

Driving in through the outskirts of the city, you pass appallingly poor shanty towns constructed of scrap metal and cardboard, some without electricity or running water, some considered too dangerous even to venture into. In the historic city center you walk down teeming sidewalks lined with stupendously baroque colonial buildings that take up entire city blocks, past roaring soot-spitting buses packed like sardine cans, past the looming presidential palace in front of which an honor guard goose-steps in lavish Napoleonic uniforms, past towering stone churches and brooding monasteries, at last arriving at a filthy trickle of a river lined with garbage and rubble.

Out in affluent Miraflores you can nibble on smoked ribs at a Tony Roma’s perched on a cliff overlooking the surf, or buy overpriced North Face trekking gear at trendy sporting goods boutiques. Glittering multi-story casinos with names like Atlantic City and Casino Fiesta entice strolling passersby with walls of flashing lights and row upon row of honking slot machines visible through open-air entryways. Starbucks, Chili’s, Dunkin’ Doughnuts, TGI Fridays, Pizza Hut–just about all the American chains are represented here as well. There’s even a Peruvian version of Whole Foods, where Muzak renditions of Bob Marley tunes waft over stacks of spit-shined organic fruit, shelves of gluten-free breads, and refrigerated display cases full of grass-fed Angus steaks. Out on the front steps one-armed beggars and toothless old ladies panhandle and peddle trinkets to customers walking to their cars with bulging grocery bags.

The streets of Lima–especially in the turn-of-the-century seaside suburbs of Miraflores and Barranco–are a phantasmagoria of divergent architectural styles. Tucked away in the shadows of homely glass high-rises and sooty concrete monoliths you see vestiges of early 20th Century splendor: ivy-covered Tudor manors, terracotta Santa Fe villas, craftsman bungalows, streamlined Art Deco storefronts, Swiss chalets, mansard-roofed mansions seemingly plucked from the French countryside–the variety and incongruity of styles is bewildering.

Paragliders sail over the beach in Miraflores.

Lima’s weather defies all conventions. I’ve yet to figure out how a city basking in a barren desert right on the ocean, halfway between the Equator and the Tropic of Capricorn, can be quite chilly much of the year. From April to November Lima marinates in a relentless overcast that renders the sky the color of slushy snow. I read that this phenomenon–called garúa–has had a profound impact on the Limeño psyche and that its numbing effect is a recurring theme in Peruvian literature. Even Herman Melville called Lima “the strangest saddest place.”

The weather here indeed stinks, but we’ve taken quite a shine to Lima and its many faces. We hate to leave with so much of the city still unexplored, but tomorrow morning we fly out to the Inca capital of Cuzco, high up in the Andes. From there it’s on to Machu Picchu!